5 Reasons Java is Still Preferred For Enterprise Software Projects

by Siya Carla Sr. Web & Graphic Designer , Blogger

2017 witnessed a string of hot debates regarding Java, its development and its abilities to cater to the ever-increasing needs of modern Java developers, particularly when it comes to developing enterprise applications.

Several technology analysts keep beating around the bushes on how soon Java will disappear as a programming language for enterprise apps, while most contradict.

In fact, Java is one of the most widely used programming languages, the number of Java projects increased by up to 20% during this year, and the Java user base is expanding at the velocity of knots.

Now over two decades old, Java has lived up to the expectations in terms of the characteristic efficiency, performance and flexibility provided by C, with write-once, run-anywhere ease through the implementation of platform-specific runtime environments.

The original design goals of Java explain its long-lasting popularity: It's easy to use, object-oriented, secure and robust, architecturally-neutral, threaded, dynamic, portable, interpreted, along with being heavy-duty.

The recent Developer Economics survey provides another indication to the briskly increasing use of Java: It's very prevalent among cloud providers and supported universally by cloud APIs.

The report stated that cloud developers running Java have improved flexibility when it comes to selecting a cloud host, and the improvement in the use of Java may well indicate a craving to maintain that flexibility in view of a changing market.

Let’s have a quick look at the top 5 reasons why Java is still preferred for enterprise software projects:

Practicality

As described by James Gosling, Java is a “blue collar” programming language. It was developed to permit developers get their tasks done with the lowest possible fuss, while enabling the developers to catch up someone else’s code and understand figure it out.

You can, however, surely write unreadable code in Java, similar to that in any other language, but with robust coding conventions it’s far more readable than most other languages.

2. Backward compatibility

Sun and later Oracle have made massive efforts to make sure that code written in one version of Java continues to run unchanged on a newer version.

Though it hasn’t been the case at all times (enumerations in Java SE 5, assertions in Java SE 1.4,) and has at times led to the implementation that could’ve been far better without compatibility (generics), making it one of the most fascinating features for developers.

There is nothing unpleasant than hitting a code that works flawlessly and having to make changes to it so that it can work well on a newer version of the same platform. That’s just a sheer waste of time.

3. Scalability and rich performance

Java is a gilt-edged platform that functions on a level that can hardly match or even exceed that of native code, all thanks to JVM optimizations with dynamic rather than static code analysis.

When we talk about scalability, give a thought to the IT behemoths using Java: Twitter (that migrated from Ruby-on-Rails to the JVM as RoR had scaling troubles), Salesforce, eBay, Spotify, Facebook, and, of course, Oracle!

Spark, Hadoop, and Cassandra - the framework for the majority of big data projects, are either coded in Scala or Java and run well on the JVM.

Therefore, if performance and scalability are your areas of concern, Java and the JVM is a certain favorite.

4. Freshness

This one is certainly big!

A look at the TIOBE graph and you can make out there is a considerable upswing in Java popularity over the last couple of years, which is right after the launch of JDK 8.

JDK 8 was a drastic transformation for developers working with Java since it introduced the streams API and Lambda expressions.

And just like that, Java developers were able to do things in a more convenient and functional manner without really having to learn an entirely new language such as Scala.

These features helped developers effortlessly make the most of multi-core/multi-processor machines without the need to go for potentially error-prone and complex multi-threaded code.

With project Jigsaw delivered in JDK 9 this year, modularity has made it much easier for developers to build, deploy and maintain big enterprise applications. There is already news for new language features, such as value types, in JDK 10.

5. High-end security

Java is also popular for its security standards and robust features of safe programming. Enterprises can download any folder with non-trusted programs.

In addition, the application can make use of these codes in a secure manner. Enterprise apps abandon the corrupted data and use them in a secure manner for developing applications in Java.

These 5 points clearly indicate that Java is on a rise, and 2018 looks promising for any Java development company as more and more businesses will look to get enterprise software solutions developed in Java.